Understanding YouTube SEO to grow your channel - Channel Review

So if you struggle with figuring out this whole YouTube optimization SEO algorithm stuff that is just annoying the crap out of you. In this video, I'm going to walk through the eight things you need to focus on to make sure you master YouTube SEO. So if you are new here, my name is Trena and I am a YouTube strategist and on this channel I help creative entrepreneurs like you get started on YouTube. And on this live stream I'm going to do a live channel review of one of my Facebook group people and I'm going to walk through the eight key parts of YouTube optimization that he should look at doing better or improving to really help grow his channel. So the eight things I'm going to be talking about are. I got these written down to make sure I don't forget are. Where do we put them? Is the title, thumbnail, description box, captions, cards, end screens. This is why I wrote it down because I knew I would forget one. Then the last one is probably on the floor. Closed captions, I said that. Tags. Okay, you guys, we'll go through this one more time. Titles, description, tags, playlist, closed caption, end cards, card cards and thumbnails. The eight things that you need to know. So why don't we flip on over to his channel and yes, it's a his. I'm featuring a male today so I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. We're going to jump over to his channel. You pull it up and we are doing Leadership with Mike. Also if you're watching here on Instagram or on YouTube, be sure to say hello. I see Mike is here. I see Kim is here. Diana and Saeed tv. How are you guys? Alright, so we're going to take a look at Mike's channel which is called Leadership with Mike. And so the first thing we are going to look at in my list of eight is his titles. So what I want you to understand about titles is they have got to really capture your viewers attention, right? You got to put in the key, the keywords but also grab people's attention. So I have these notes all written out so I make sure I'm not missing anything for you guys. But you know what, thank you. They are all over the place because my kids were in here. Alright, so with a title it's got to pitch a value and then you've got to have that central focus keyword that you're really going for. So one of Mike's most recent uploads is know your employees better and judge them less. Okay, good Keywords, I believe he's going for know your employees better. Um, but what's that it factor? What's going to grab their attention? Well, what does really well with YouTube titles are lists, mistakes, things to avoid. So for Mike, I would suggest for this particular video, maybe doing three ways you could learn to know your employees better, because you've got that hook. They're like, oh, three ways. Okay. That entices them a little bit more. And you've got to just not clickbait, but close to clickbait. So then we're going to move on to. The second thing that I'm going to talk about here is thumbnails. And the one thing that you do not want to do with your thumbnails is just repeat the title and the thumbnail. This is the spot for you to really get their attention. Your thumbnail has to tell a story with that image. So I'm not really sure where the car comes into play with knowing your employees. So it doesn't really tell a complete story. If you're on Instagram, he has a thumbnail with him sitting in the car. And I do see that it says road ran. But here's the thing that road ran is a bit small, and on cell phones, you're not really going to get to see that. So you need to keep your thumbnails really, really minimal with minimal amount of text. And that text has got to just support the story that you are sharing in your image. And so the thumbnail will connect with the tit. How can you show in that thumbnail how to know your employees better? Maybe it'd be better if you had a picture of you, like, with your arm around an employee or at a coffee shop with an employee, like, talking. That kind of connects with the title then, because it sees you with an employee, and they're like, oh, I'm a. I'm a leader. I want to get to know my employees better. I want to be able to have coffee with them. So that kind of connects more. Does that make sense? I'm going to answer all your questions here at the end of this because I don't have two screens up, so I can't flip back and forth for right now. So we talked about title, and then we talked about the thumbnail so far. So let's jump over to his specific video and see how he optimized the description box. So one thing that you want to do in your description box is definitely write, like, a paragraph or so of what the video is about, Basically a summary. You Want to focus on about five keywords that you really want to target for your search. Okay, so I know by looking at this plugin that I have that Mike is currently ranking for know your employees better, learn about your staff, know your team members, and learn about your employees. So those would be great keywords that he could work into a paragraph describing what this video is about. Focus on those five keywords. One of those keywords obviously needs to be in your title. It needs to be in your description box and also needs to be in your tags. That's that one central keyword that you're focusing that video around. And then you have four other ones you want to weave into your description box. What you also want to do in your description box is if you look at YouTube and you see this show more, most people are not clicking on show more. So what you want to really do is have a link here that goes to another video or another playlist. Because watch time minutes are currency on YouTube. This is your gold. The more amount of time you can accumulate of people watching your videos, the more valuable YouTube is going to see your channel. So if you can get them over to another playlist or another video from this video by having a playlist above the show more, that's going to help you accumulate those watch time minutes and become more valuable to YouTube. So I definitely suggest there adding a link to a playlist. Next, let's talk about tags. So he's doing a really good job. If his keyword is know your employees better, he has know your employees better here. I wouldn't suggest just repeating the title in the description box. I would, I would use that keyword in a conversational text or conversational paragraph. All right, so he has know your keywords better in the title, know your employees better in the title, know your employees better in the description box, and know your employees better here in tags. And that's probably one of the reasons why he's ranking for know your employees better. So he's ranking number one for that three specific tag, that specific keyword, because he's got it all over the place. Also with tags, what I would suggest doing is having a combination of generic keywords along with long tail keywords. So he's done a very good job of doing this with how to know your team members and then longer ones, like getting to know your employees better, how to understand your team members. So you can always add generic along with long tail keywords as long as it describes describes what your video is about. Do not put other people's channel names in your tags even if you have similar topics to them. If you're thinking that's going to get you showing up in their suggested videos, that's not going to happen. So do not put other people's channel names in your tags unless they're actually in your video. All right, so we've got tags, we've got title, description, tags, closed captioning. I believe Mike has closed captioning. I'm just going to double check here. It looks like it. So you always want to have closed captioning as well because this increases your audience retention, which increases your audience, your watch time, minutes. Because some people just like to read the text and are able to watch longer by reading the text. There's also the deaf community that needs closed captioning. But a lot of people can have a longer retention when they have that text on the screen. So always add Captions. I use Rev.com and they charge me a dollar per minute to create that caption file. And then what's great about that is I can then upload my video to Facebook too and have a caption file. So closed caption now. Cards. So I know from this plugin that I have from Vidiq that Mike has one card in here in one in this video and three end screens, which is great. The is you can have up to three, up to five cards in your video and that's really what you want to do. The first place that I want you to add a card is when you go into your analytics and you check out your audience retention, your average audience retention. So I'm going to show mine here on my channel. If I go to my average view duration, the average amount of time people stay on my video is 2 minutes and 27 seconds. So what I want to do is I add a card at about 2 minutes and 60, 17 seconds, about 10 seconds prior to that average drop off rate so that they can go to another video of mine, still watch my video. But if they're getting bored with the current one they're watching, I suggest another one. And an added bonus is to suggest a playlist because then they get dumped into a couple of your videos and they start binging Netflix style, right? So that's the first place you want to add your cards. And then you just want to kind of filter them throughout your video or as you're scripting your videos, think about other videos you could suggest to during that video. So if you're talking about like your favorite camera and you also have a playlist on all of your favorite equipment. Make sure you mention that and you point to the card up above because maybe they want to know more about your equipment. All right, so that's what you want to do with cards. Then what you can do is after your video is live for a little bit, you can go back to your audience retention graph and see where people are leaving and add cards at that dip. Alright, so now the final thing we want to talk about is end screens. And Mike has end screens right here. So these are end screens. You can add them in YouTube. You don't need anything fancy. You have access to them. And he's doing a great job of sending people to a playlist and also to a video. And then he has his subscribe button right here. So those are the eight key optimization parts you've really got to focus on when uploading your YouTube videos. And those were your title and your description box, your tags, playlist, closed caption cards, end screen and thumbnails. So I'm going to go ahead and take any questions that I have here on YouTube, also Instagram. If anybody on there has questions, feel free to ask me and I will get right to you. Hi guys. All right, so let's see what questions that we have over here on YouTube. Mike says, Totally picked my worst rushed video. I'm sorry, I just picked your most recent one. Sorry, Mike, do you use TubeBuddy or Vidiq, which is good? Is Vidiq great for rankings? So Vidiq and TubeBuddy basically do the same thing. I have both of them installed. I do have TubeBuddy, the paid for version. They actually really haven't used either one of them a whole lot other than helping me find tags. So I mean Vidiq and TubeBuddy, it's really what you prefer, how you prefer to read analytics. And yeah, there's not really one that's better than the other one's not going to get you better ranked than the other. They basically do similar things. Yeah, Diana uses both and likes them both. The timing of the card, amazing. I'm glad you like that, Mike. Diana, great tips. Emily, where do you add closed captioning? Okay, so let me go ahead and share my screen and show you where you can add closed captioning. Since I'm already doing this, just do a full on tutorial. So when you go into your back end here and you go to your video manager, of course this is probably going to take a little bit of time. When you go into your video manager, you're going to Go to the video that you want to add captions to. So I'm going to click edit. And then you go right here to subtitles. And you can send the link to Rev.com or you can send the link, or you can actually let Rev have access to your YouTube channel. And then what you want to do is click Add new Subtitles English. And then you can upload a file and RevRev.com will send you those. So that's how you do that. I hear that my child is waking up from his nap. So, okay, what other questions do we have here today? Find the comment section. How do you change style gently? Will you definitely lose Jay? So I'm thinking you're changing your niche. Just start easing into it, start sharing a video. And if you lose subscribers, then that's obviously not your target audience. You're probably going after a specific audience, right? And so if you do lose subscribers, that's okay because you're going over, going for somebody different, right? So it's okay. You could do it slowly or just rip the band aid right off and just start doing new videos. How do you create great thumbnails? Is it through Canva? I actually have a graphic designer right now that does mine, but I used PicMonkey. PicMonkey is great because you can saturate them, which. Thumbnails that do really well on YouTube are highly saturated, sharp images, and you can see the whites of a person's eye. So always have yourself on a thumbnail and minimal text. If you can show some kind of emotion or some kind of story in that thumbnail, those are the ones that do the best. How do you cut through all the noise of other channels doing the same type of stuff? I like to look at similar channels to see what they're doing and then put my spin on it. So when you get started, you may have to kind of copy, not really copy, but follow their format, a couple videos and see what's working for you and then evolve that format into your own format. It's okay to get started following somebody's format and doing something similar to them. So. So as you start to do it, you can really find your style and your way of doing it so that it evolves into being your own type of content. What do you suggest to go deeper in finding key questions your audience wants to know? I like to ask my audience. I also tend to go into YouTube search and just start typing in questions and kind of going down that rabbit hole to seeing what people are doing videos about. Which videos are Performing well. I also like to see what leaders in my industry are doing and do similar videos, only giving my personal take on that specific topic or giving my own tips. So that's where I would get started. Also think about a series of videos. So for me, my channel was ranking really well for video ideas. So I went into like my analytics and my traffic source, and one of my top keywords is video ideas. So that's why you've been seeing me put out a couple videos on video ideas for your newsletter, video ideas that get views. And then I created a playlist on best video ideas for YouTube in 2018 because they all link together, they all start suggesting people to each other, and they all start doing better on YouTube. So, oh, before I forget, also make sure that you are subscribed to my channel and you click that bell so you're notified when I go live. Because in the next couple of weeks, I'm going to be actually pulling somebody live from the comment section to do their channel review. So I won't be planning ahead anymore. I'm just going to grab somebody who's actually live in the channel review and review their channel. So don't forget, you want to make sure that you're here when I go live. So if you hit that bell, that'll let you know when I am live. So you can be one of the first ones in here to make sure your channel gets reviewed. How to remove the background noises, appliances. Yeah, so you've got to just unplug it. I know with a couple of my videos, my desktop computer was making a humming and people pointed that out. So I had unplugged my desktop computer, turn it off during those videos. I also turn off the air conditioner or the heater when I do the videos because you could hear the humming. It's just finding out what's making that noise and turning it off so that your background noise isn't distracting. Do you search for your target audience or wait for them to search you out? So, Mike, I knew my audience who I wanted to help just based on my journey and where I was at in my business was going to be women basically around my age. But now it's kind of expanded. I've got you now. I've got some other men that are following me too. And so it's kind of just figuring out, who do you want to reach? Who is your content going to resonate with? What is your ideal client? Who do you want to work with? And then start working that into your target audience. You guys Got a lot of questions here today. Let me tell you. Also continue to leave me questions if I don't get them answered. Today I'm gonna be doing a Q and A video on my channel. I'm gonna screen capture all of your questions, put them up on YouTube as I work through them so that your channel could potentially be featured in one of my next videos. So I'm really excited about that. I also would love to hear input from you guys what you're thinking about with my new upload schedule. So I've been uploading every Monday through Friday. I've been doing YouTube tips, business tips, kind of lifestyle habit routines and tips. Then Thursdays have been live, every single Thursday at 1pm and Fridays have been vlogging. So I just love to get some feedback from any of you to see, you know, what you're enjoying. If you're liking the 5 day upload schedule, I'm really just testing it out to see get some data to let you guys know how it works, if it's worth it, how it grows your channel, does it grow it faster so I can provide all of you that information. So if we don't have any other questions here today, I'm going to go ahead and wrap up this live. Just remember the eight parts of optimization are title, description, tags, playlist, closed caption cards and screens, and thumbnails. Again, if you have questions, feel free to reach out to me. I have a free Facebook group. It's in the description box below as well. You can join there, ask me personal questions. That's where I'm at a lot of the time and so I'd love to have you there. Thank you guys for watching. Don't forget to subscribe and I will see you tomorrow here with a new vlog. Bye guys.